The Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta synthesized the downstream Mississippi within a week-long field research and educational event at Tulane University, as well as sites in and around New Orleans.

Synthesizing the braided research undertaken upriver by the five Anthropocene River Field Stations and tying it together with explorations in and around New Orleans, this one-week educational event presented a culmination of the year-long Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project. In collaboration with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (NOCGS) at Tulane University, a series of six field seminars and public programs provided a frame for learning about the historical legacies, social conditions, and ecological precarity of living and surviving in the Mississippi Delta.

When the Mississippi River, having drained one-eighth of the entire continent, reaches the delta it does not only bring with it the whole material and cultural legacy of the anthropogenic territory it went through. It epitomizes the many vernacular contours of the Anthropocene and, at the same time, reconfigures them towards a global meshwork of teleconnected consequences. Marking a decisive shift from a tributary to a distributary system, the unique geography of the delta and its “thick” locality represents both the acme of the Anthropocene River, as well as its outflow into the global sphere of open waters. It exemplifies as much a local Anthropocene topography as it draws out a global topology of Anthropocene bearings and relationships.

Synthesizing the findings of the Field Stations, the Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta unfolds key themes—ranging from the flow of commodities, river engineering, and risk and equity to clashing Anthropocene temporalities, claims to property and access, and the stark reality of spiritual and material exhaustion—and investigates them locally in and around the delta. With a series of six field research centered seminars and collateral public events, the aim is to open up novel collaborative and exploratory epistemological practices.